How Smart Is Your Cat? Here’s How to Tell The cat brain Can your cat respond to his or her name? ( Do cats know their names?) Tell the difference between your voice and that of a stranger? Easily locate a toy hidden behind a solid object, say, a piece of furniture? If the answer to all these questions is yes, it’s a sign that your kitty is pretty smart, according to feline behaviorist Kristyn Vitale, PhD, a cat researcher at Oregon State University’s Human-Animal Interaction Lab. Today, Felis silvestris catus is one of the world’s most popular pets, with an estimated 600 million of them living in households worldwide. And we can see why, looking at these pictures of the cutest cat breeds. “I think the ability of cats to be very flexible in their behavior is one reason they’ve been so popular,” Vitale says. “They can do well in an apartment or on a farm.” Surprisingly, relatively little research to date has been devoted to cat cognition, cat intelligence, or their internal mental processes, especially compared with the sizable number of studies conducted on dogs’ mental processes. Here's how to tell if your dog is smart.